That parent application discloses a conveyor system for transporting newspapers or like sheet paper products from station to station in a processing plant at high speeds. It provides a transport system including a channel track in which rides a spaced sequence of tractor assemblies that grip, hold and release the individual paper products at precise synchronous timing to various work process stations for such operations as addressing, stacking, counting, etc. This continuation-in-part application relates to improved transport tractor assembly structure.
Prior to the parent application, endless conveyors with spaced gripping elements were proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,955,667--E. Muller et al., May 11, 1976. In that type of prior art various problems exist in the transport tractor assemblies.
For example, in any system requiring precise timing or alignment, the clamps, jaws or grippers must hold each paper in a precise spacing relationship without variations and in exact alignment. After a paper is gripped and in the clamp assembly, it is possible to change timing and alignment if there are gravity stressed placed on the papers by hanging and when bends or unnatural shapes are forced in the papers by the clamp mechanism. Any rotary motion components possible in the clamp or paper can either misalign the paper or require it to be fed critically in exact balanced center position. Thus, the prior art has not produced a clamping tractor transport assembly for paper products that satisfactorily meets the precision timing and alignment criteria for feeding a paper at high speeds into a sequence of processing stations. Thus, any advantages gained in transport would be lost by the necessity to provide realignment or retiming equipment at various processing stations in a system.
Thus, it is an objective of this invention to provide improved high speed gripper clamp transport assemblies for conveying paper sheet products along a track between various processing stations of a system, which resolves the foregoing problems and provides other features, solutions and advantages found throughout the following description, the drawings and the claims.